Yibing
Chen
Game Designer & Level Designer
Food Truck Dream
Team Size: 10 | Engine: Unity 2D | Pocket Gems Internship Project [June-July 2022]
My Roles: General gameplay designer, narrative designer
Food Truck Dream is a merge-2 mobile game in which players merge food ingredients, serve customers, and personalize their food truck park. It is one of the experimental pivots based on Pocket Gem's mobile game, Adventure Chef.
The game was published on iOS and Android (currently taken down).
My Responsibilities
Level Design
- Designed the merge board layout with purposefully placed food items.
- Designed the "appliance" mechanic that is unique from other merge-2 games. The appliances, combined with existing food items, can create brand-new food merge chains.
Narrative
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Wrote dialogues for all four chapters.
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Impemented dialogues in Unity 2D.
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Merge Board Design
Step 1, goals:
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Fill the merge board with mergeable items
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The layout should guide players through the early stages of the game.
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The layout should create a coherent pacing with the quests and truck (generator) unlocks.
Step 2, research:
Study the early flow of other merge-2 games and summarize three points
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Inside - early merge chains and generator parts, low on the merge chain.
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Outside - late merge chains and generator parts, high on the merge chain.
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Satisfying early merging sessions
Step 3, design:
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I used the wireframe designed by our UI designer. This gave me a sense of what I would be working with.
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When the implementation tech wasn’t in, I sketched the potential item placements on the wireframe.
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I focused on the early flow: the board's inner circle. The early flow is important for several reasons:
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A satisfying early game keeps players' interest and engagement
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The early game must be self-sufficient and not giving too many resources, stimulating players to push forward. When players unlock the outer circles, they enter the mid/late-game, and they will have all generators. Thus the items on the outer layers don’t need to be concise.
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After playtests, I gradually filled all the items in. I left the outer circle items flexible in case of mechanic changes.
Appliance Mechanic
I suggested adding a row of unique ingredients on top of the merge board to differentiate our game from other food-themed merge-2 games. With the help of other designers, we eventually designed three unique appliances: blender, grill, and frier. Players drag merged food items into these appliances to create new items. For example, players click the truck generator to generate lemons and drag merged lemons into the blender to create lemonade.